PALLAS'S SAND-GROUSE. 377 



localities, the strange beauty of their form and plumage, 

 added to the extreme rarity of specimens up to that time, 

 in either pubhc or private collections, rendered them 

 objects of peculiar attraction to naturalists ; whilst the 

 frequent notices of their occurrence by the press, in all 

 parts of the kingdom, made the public generally familiar 

 with their abnormal migration. But few, however, of 

 those who, in 1863, took so warm an interest in the 

 appearance of these birds on our eastern coast were 

 probably aware that the Lynn museum contained a fine 

 male specimen, killed in that neighbourhood in July, 

 ISSO,"^ one of the first if not actually the first example 

 obtained in the United Kingdom. The occurrence of 

 this extreme rarity was at once made known to the 

 scientific world in a letter to the "Ibis" (1859, p. 472) 

 by the Rev. F. L. Currie,t who was at that time residing 

 in the neighbourhood of Lynn, and took a lively 

 interest in its museum collections. From this com- 

 munication it appears that the above specimen, in very 

 perfect plumage, was shot early in the month of July, 

 in the parish of Walpole St. Peter's, about two miles 

 from the Wash, and, as Mr. Currie remarks, *^we must 

 congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune in securing 

 the bird at all, considering it was shot by a labouring 



* On the 9th of the same month, as has been stated by Mr. 

 T. J. Moore and Mr. Alfred Newton in the "Ibis" (1860 and 

 1864), a second was killed near Tremadoc, in North Wales; on 

 the 23rd, a third, near Hobro, in Jutland ; and at the beginning of 

 October a fourth, being " one of a pair which had haunted the 

 sand-hills near Zandvoort, in Holland, since July, was shot at that 

 place." A fifth example was also killed at New Romney, in Kent, 

 in November ; and a pair are recorded, on good authority, to have 

 been procured in May of that year (1859) "in the government of 

 Wilna, on the western frontier of the Russian empire." 



t Mr. Currie also inserted a shorter notice in the " Zoologist" 

 (p. 6764), in which journal the Welsh specimen had been previously 

 recorded by Mr. T. J, Moore (p. 6728). 

 3c 



